


(when you're living on your knees you) rise up

by ataxophilia



Series: the aim of falling (is to fly) [1]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Wings, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-16
Updated: 2015-11-16
Packaged: 2018-05-01 20:59:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5220617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ataxophilia/pseuds/ataxophilia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time Alexander jumps from the tree, he walks away with a broken wrist, a limp, and a new determination. </p><p>or; Alexander Hamilton learns to fly, literally.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(when you're living on your knees you) rise up

**Author's Note:**

> This is entirely Swan's fault and I will only accept up to 50% of the blame for it. 
> 
> Unbeta'd. Let me know if anything is glaringly wrong. 
> 
> Based on the musical because I haven't done enough actual historical research. As such, this account of Hamilton's childhood probably isn't very accurate even beyond the obvious change.

Climbing the tree is easy. 

Alexander’s been doing it his whole life, after all – there’s not much for a kid to do on the island other than climb and chase and swim. He learnt how to shimmy up the trunks behind their house almost as soon as he could walk to them. 

Getting out onto one of the branches is harder. When they were smaller the island kids used to dare each other to crawl out, skinned knees and muddy palms clinging to the bark. One of the girls fell once, and cracked her head open on the baked dirt. Alexander remembers the sharp smell of blood in the heat, the dark smear on the ground when they moved the body. 

They hadn’t understood, back then. Hurting wasn’t something permanent. 

Now, Alexander makes his way slowly, watching the branch beneath his hands and not the floor beneath that. The sun is hot on his bare back, on muscles twitching with adrenaline and downy feathers fluttering against skin. 

When he’s far enough out he shifts his weight onto his feet and stands, careful.

He’s seen baby birds throw themselves out of nests enough times to know how this works.

He inhales steadily, and then jumps.

 

* * *

 

It starts when he’s seven years old. He doesn’t remember it, not really, not beyond the dull ache of new growth and the quiet reassurance of his mother’s hands on his back.

When he asks her about it, one rainy night, the both of them sitting in front of the fire, alone in the house, she runs her fingers over the grey fluff where his proper feathers haven’t grown in yet, and says, “You were so small.”

Alexander leans into the touches, so she buries her fingers deeper, curls them into the shafts and the down until his eyes are drooping, his question almost forgotten.

“You were skinny,” she continues, after their long stretch of silence. Alexander shifts, twists his head so he’s looking up at her. She moves one hand to his hair and smiles. “I was so terrified. I thought—I don’t know what I thought. Just that something was wrong. I’d never seen, well.” Her fingers tighten on Alexander’s wing. “No one had told me what to do when my child started growing wings. But you weren’t scared at all. You kept complaining that it itched, but you sounded more annoyed that anything else.”

There’s a pause as she glances over at the door, like she’s expecting Alexander’s father to walk in, and then she’s smiling at Alexander again, brushing his hair behind his ear the same way she brushes her own back. Alexander has her hair – he has her hair and her smile and none of her even temper.

It takes him a long time to regret that absence.

For now, he tilts his head into her touch and tells her, “You don’t have to be scared anymore.”

His mother laughs, a soft, tired sound. Her thumb brushes over his cheek. “Oh, Alex,” she sighs. “I haven’t been scared for you for a long time now.”

 

* * *

 

The first time Alexander jumps from the tree, he walks away with a broken wrist, a limp, and a new determination. 

For a heartbeat, while he’s falling, he thinks it’s worked. He’s weightless, air rushing in his ears– and then he’s dropping, hitting the floor with a cracking noise. The ground is harder than he remembers when he hits it.

A pair of men walking by throw him a glance. One of them mutters something, the other laughs. Alexander’s flush is a reflex – he’s lived enough years as one of the bastard kids on the island to be properly ashamed by their mockery. 

He wraps his abandoned shirt around his wrist to keep it vaguely straight and sets about climbing back up the tree one-handed.

 

* * *

 

By the time he makes it home that night he can’t move the fingers on one hand and he’s got to lean on one of the kids from next door to walk. 

His mother runs her hands through his hair and sighs at him before pressing a kiss to his forehead. 

“Try not to kill yourself,” she says. Alexander ducks away from her and laughs, full of the invincibility of a ten year old despite the beatings he’s taken from the ground.

Three weeks later his mother is struggling to breathe, hand clammy between both of Alexander’s, eyes darting around the room like she’s not seeing any of it. 

They settle, briefly, on Alexander, fledgling wings out like they usually are in the house, now that Alexander’s father is gone and no one comes calling on them. “My angel,” she whispers, fingers twitching like she wants to reach out. 

Alexander’s chest, already tight from the illness he’s only just shaken, closes. His mother is so far gone that it’s impossible to tell whether or not she knows she’s looking at him. 

This is the weakest she’s been yet. He can hear the way her lungs struggle with every inhale. Her skin is paper-thin, terrifyingly delicate against his palms.

He knows that he might never see her again.

If this is to be his last memory of her then he’d rather cling to the hope that she’s still lucid, that she’s aware the wings spread out behind him are his own, and not the result of some fevered delusion.

 

* * *

 

After the funeral – a quiet thing, for all that it’s busy with the people he grew up with, more than Alexander had expected trailing in and out of the little church to offer him their condolences – after, he goes back to his tree. 

He’s in his best clothes but it seems unimportant when the only person who’d ever cared about what he wore to mass each week is gone. He balls them up at the base of the tree and starts to climb, ignoring the shooting pain that still flares in his wrist, the ache in his muscles from the days he spent in bed. 

It’s easier to crawl out onto the branch now. It’s easy to stand, to hurl himself forward into the air. 

His wings stretch and tense as he falls, trying to hold him up, but they’re still too young. New feathers grow in each day – Alexander feels them pushing through his skin; they still itch like a nightmare – but it’s not enough, not yet.

That doesn’t stop Alexander from spending his days at the tree, climbing and falling and climbing and falling, making his way home with bruises and sprains and cracked ribs as the sun starts to fade. 

There’s never anyone waiting for him anymore. His cousin works endlessly, fighting demons only he can see with a frantic effort that Alexander will come to admire and then understand, later, much later.

 

* * *

 

After his cousin’s funeral, Alexander finds a taller tree.

He jumps harder, falls harder, keeps pushing harder. He fractures both the bones in his left calf, and finds a rocky crag to fall from instead. He comes home to an empty house and eat what scraps his neighbours can offer and wakes up to do it all again. 

Until one afternoon his wings stretch, beat, and lift him.

 

* * *

 

The first few moments are disorientating. Alexander’s stomach twists as the inertia hits him at the sudden change from falling to rising. He stays braced for his usual landing until his wingbeats even out into a steadier rhythm and it hits him that he’s staying in the air. His ankle, twisted a few jumps back, hangs awkwardly beneath him but it doesn’t hurt. 

And then it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever felt.

His wings take him high enough that he can see the sea sprawling out past the shoreline. It stretches as far as he can see, but he knows that somewhere out there is America, and the chance for a brighter future, and–

And–

Alexander is breathless with sudden, sharp hope.

Now he has the means to reach it. 

He’s still watching the horizon, thinking of the possibility, when his wings falter mid-beat and he’s dropping again, hitting the floor before his wings can correct themselves. 

The fall breaks his wrist again, but Alexander barely notices. He’s too busy thinking about the maps his cousin used to pour over late into the night, the islands sketched out in a sea of blue-washed paint, America a set distance away. 

His wings aren’t strong enough yet, he knows that much, but they can carry him, and they will get stronger. 

And they will take him to America. 

He climbs back up the tree.

**Author's Note:**

> This is -- potentially -- the first part of an au that Swan and I have been crying over for a while now, so please feel free to bully me into writing more and/or cry over it's potential heartbreak (I promise you that it gets very heartbreaking), either on here or on my [tumblr](http://wearealsoboats.tumblr.com/). I'm always more than happy to yell about it, or about Hamilton in general, or anything, really.


End file.
